For a month’s respite from new blogs I am posting a memoir dissected into four A Memoir from Western New Guinea (some names have been changed) There was a message waiting in my office from an unidentified caller. Jacob was
Whatever the etymology of Passchendaele, the little Flemish village sounds to me like “Valley of Passion” in English. In 1917, it was a valley of mud and cordite, steel and fire. The dirt was burned and scoured of life, except
A light went out in Scotland on Christmas Day. Marion Fraser passed away. In a cynical age we have low expectations of “virtue” in our public figures whose ranks often seem unattainable except to those with the privileges that come
At my first dental examination in North America the Montrealer with a deep knowledge of the ethnography of decay leaned back from my chair and holding his pick aloft declared, “You have British teeth.” His tone was grave, like a
It will be missed by no one on this side of the North Atlantic that Thanksgiving Day 2016 falls on Thursday. Yet, some Virginians mindful of another tradition already had their Thanksgiving a fortnight ago. They resent the hegemony of
A slab of yellow sandstone larger than a dinner plate lay at the foot of an old maple tree close to a woodland trail in the Allegheny Mountains. The shadow of an inscription on its flat face made me pause
I wonder if anywhere tugs at the heart more than an island home for an islander. This whimsical thought came to me while cruising on the Bay for a return visit to Tangier Island, when I was reminded of a
“Christmas comes round faster every time, Roger, and the years go by more quickly when you get to my age.” Grandma’s warning was also the annual refrain we heard from a lot of older folk as we grew up, and
The virtual extinction of the American chestnut across its range is like the story of the sack and burning of Troy. A few old timers can still remember when it was the dominant canopy tree both sides of the Appalachian
